Designing the Book

With the final selection of images now decided, I had all I needed to begin the design process for the book that would form the core of my project. Before starting the design process, I decided to set out some thoughts on what I wanted to include in the book. The ideas that came to my mind were the following…

· Monochromatic design, to keep in fitting with the images of the book I want to keep the design monochromatic/grayscale and also give the book a more sophisticated and refined look.

· Leaf pages, I wanted to include the use of leaf pages (blank pages of solid colour) to separate areas of the book such as the preface from the plates.

· Printing as large as I can get the book, the consistent response with my images is that they work well big, as the fine detail and complex nature really lends itself to being in a large format where these can really be picked apart and taken into account as a whole.

· Keeping as much of the ambiguity around the images as possible, traditionally with many photobooks, alongside the images would be a title, date, location and sometimes a medium, size and notes on the image. With these images though I don’t want to provide anything that might skew or guide the viewer towards an outcome or interpretation that they haven’t fully arrived at themselves, or anything that might speed up the reading through additional context or information and therefore bypass the effect by where the longer the image is viewed the more detail and meaning comes through.

With this as a core for my ideas about how I wanted the book to look, feel, and read I set about beginning the design process. For the project, I would be using the online book printing service Blurb, being a market leader in their field and having seen their work in the past through friends’ projects they have printed using Blurb. Another reason for choosing Blurb is that they provide a proprietary designing software that allows user to create their designs with the exact sizes of their printing options available and also guides that show their safe and bleed zones, this would be useful as I planned to utilise as much page space as I could to get the best quality to size ration for the plates in the book. Having used other programs like Adobe InDesign in the past for making Zines, I had some experience with the design process for book-type products but for this I wanted to use a software that would be able to assist to my specific needs as much as possible, as with many of the Adobe programs, they mostly serve as very powerful tools for creators and the more you know and the more able you are with them, the better and more professional looking you can make things with them. In my experience however I’ve found that if you aren’t as proficient in the software, they can be very confusing, hard to use, and can extend the timeframe on a project exponentially as you get deeper and deeper into the project, As my skills improve with the program I would aim to use it more in the future for other such projects but for now, I decided it would be best to use Blurbs BookWright software, this way I could be sure that my designs would work with Blurbs processes and materials.

The first steps I took in designing the book was to first allocate the 22 spreads that would hold the images so I would not have to redesign and move around assets once placed and get into a mess with placements and the such, I then added the front and rear leaf pages, these would be in a dark grey colour to avoid outdoing the blacks and shadows on the plates. After this I put in the title page, my name the year on the next spread followed by the preface for the book, having not written the preface at this stage, I instead decided to allocate 2 spreads (4 pages) for the preface to use, given the size of the pages and the nature of the preface being a shorter, concise introduction to the book and its aims, I felt this would be sufficient space. Following the preface would be a leaf page to spate the introduction to the book, title, and name pages to allow the eyes to clear themselves of the words and give a moment to reflect on what They’ve just read in the preface before being shown the images. From here the plates would begin and run through on the right-hand page with only the title of the plate on the left-hand side, and for this, each image would be called its numerical sequence given during the creation stage, so for example Number 1, Number 12, Number 23, Number 40 etc., this would be to give as little away as possible to keep the interpretation and reading of the image, unique and personal to each reader. Another reason for this would be that the order of the images would break the convention of being in series (1,2,3 etc.) and would also not feature all 40 images meaning many numbers would be missing and would again leave questions and play with expectations for readers.

As mentioned previously, I planned to use the landscape images in the selection to break up the visual monotony of the portrait shape of the majority of the compositions, I decided to go with a more intuitive and instinctual basis for choosing the order of the images and went with what felt right when choosing the images, once the first image was placed, I could use and factor this into my decisions and choose images that wouldn’t feel too similar to the previous one but also not feel too out of place, this mostly wouldn’t be too much of an issue thanks to the selection process having produced a set of images that worked well together in total, it would just be refining that process to match images to their predecessor and their successor in the book. The only place in the book I knew exactly which image I wanted to go where was the very dark image of my hands with the detail sitting mostly inside of my hands, I knew I wanted to put this image in the very middle of the selection and as close as possible to the middle of the whole book and span this image across the double spread, with a black background giving the image a big space to sit in and to disrupt the visual sequencing of the book, both to create a visually interesting and eye-palette-cleansing break for the reader, but to also reference the disruption change can have on the neurodiverse mind. The text here would be shaded a dark shade of grey to sit behind the image in the visual hierarchy and not lead the eye away from the image. The software flagged the image as being a risk given it spans the gutter of the pages and might risk losing some detail but I planned to have enough space between the hands to still allow them to sit with one hand on each page and not fall into the gutter, it would still be a risk but one I was willing to take for the desired effect would be a strong and interesting element of the book.

Once I had placed all the images, checked the safe zones and felt comfortable with the order of the images, I then had to choose how to end the book, given the way in which I started the book and built up the plates I felt it might be interesting to just abruptly end the sequence to leave the reader with the images fresh in the mind rather than sewing up the reading by mirroring the intro with a slower and softer exit. For this, I therefore decided to keep it simple and just have a spread with ‘The End’ written in place of the next plate as this would be where the eye would fall to when the page was turned. After this I put in my name the date and a small legal sentence just protecting my rights to the images, this would be placed at the bottom of the following page to sit a bit more out of the way, after this it would simply be a leaf page in the same grey as before, and then the book would end. With little information or additional content after the plates ended, my hope is that the reader would leave the book with the body of work still quite fresh and undistracted allowing them to mull and think over the experience of reading the book, their own conclusions and readings left to sit with them.

The last thing to do would be to add the cover image, for this I chose one of the ‘maybe’ section images that featured a lot of detail, limited tonal range, and was of a high resolution to withstand being stretched to fit both sides and the spine of the book. The image I went with fit this brief very well and once stretched to fit the covers, brought out a nice range of detail, texture and form that mirrored the contents of the book and its more successful brethren without feeling too much of an outlier, or too focussed to seem like it should be in the book. BookWright flagged this as being possibly low resolution or pixelated but I think this was more to do with the mesh of textures in the images looking a bit like pixelation or artefacting, but the preview in the software was sharp and looked correct So I took another chance and decided it would be ok.

Overall, I felt very pleased with my design choices and that my ideas and images were being enhanced by their setting, not muddied or distracted by the design, and ultimately looked good and professional. Finalising the design on export in the software and selecting some other features such as black end sheets, removal of the blurb logo page, and assignment of an ISBN number, the process was completed and uploaded to Blurbs database ready for printing.